Does lunch table size impact workplace productivity? By using analytics and mapping interactions, we found that increasing lunch table size boosted performance by 10%. And the approach has implications reaching far beyond the cafeteria.

Revelations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election were a shock to Americans. But it wasn’t quite as surprising to people in former Soviet states and the EU. For years they’ve been exposed to Russian disinformation and slanted state media; before that Soviet propaganda filtered into the mainstream. We don’t know how effective Russian information warfare was in swaying the US election. But we do know these tactics have roots going back decades and will most likely be used for years to come. This hour, we’ll hear stories of Russian disinformation and attempts to sow chaos in Europe and the United States. We’ll learn how Russia uses its state-run media to give a platform to conspiracy theorists and how it invites viewers to doubt the accuracy of other news outlets. And we’ll look at the evolution of internet trolling from individuals to large troll farms. And — finally — what can be done to counter all this?

Some interesting papers on the “Naming Game“, a form of coordination where individuals have to agree on a name for something. This means that there is some kind of dimension reduction involved from all the naming possibilities to the agreed-on name.

Colour naming games are idealised communicative interactions within a population of artificial agents in which a speaker uses a single colour term to draw the attention of a hearer to a particular object in a shared context. Through a series of such games, a colour lexicon can be developed that is sufficiently shared to allow for successful communication, even when the agents start out without any predefined categories. In previous models of colour naming games, the shared context was typically artificially generated from a set of colour stimuli and both agents in the interaction perceive this environment in an identical way. In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of the colour naming game in a robotic setup in which humanoid robots perceive a set of colourful objects from their own perspective. We compare the resulting colour ontologies to those found in human languages and show how these ontologies reflect the environment in which they were developed.

In this paper, we study the interaction effect between the naming game and one of the simplest, yet most important collective behaviour studied in swarm robotics: self-organised aggregation. This collective behaviour can be seen as the building blocks for many others, as it is required in order to gather robots, unable to sense their global position, at a single location. Achieving this collective behaviour is particularly challenging, especially in environments without landmarks. Here, we augment a classical aggregation algorithm with a naming game model. Experiments reveal that this combination extends the capabilities of the naming game as well as of aggregation: It allows the emergence of more than one word, and allows aggregation to form a controllable number of groups. These results are very promising in the context of collective exploration, as it allows robots to divide the environment in different portions and at the same time give a name to each portion, which can be used for more advanced subsequent collective behaviours.

More Bit by Bit. Could use some worked examples. Also a login so I’m not nagged to buy a book I own.

Three studies examined the behavioral implications of a conceptual distinction between 2 types of social norms: descriptive norms, which specify what is typically done in a given setting, and injunctive norms, which specify what is typically approved in society. Using the social norm against littering, injunctive norm salience procedures were more robust in their behavioral impact across situations than were descriptive norm salience procedures. Focusing Ss on the injunctive norm suppressed littering regardless of whether the environment was clean or littered (Study 1) and regardless of whether the environment in which Ss could litter was the same as or different from that in which the norm was evoked (Studies 2 and 3). The impact of focusing Ss on the descriptive norm was much less general. Conceptual implications for a focus theory of normative conduct are discussed along with practical implications for increasing socially desirable behavior.

Construct validity centers around the match between the data and the theoretical constructs. As discussed in chapter 2, constructs are abstract concepts that social scientists reason about. Unfortunately, these abstract concepts don’t always have clear definitions and measurements.

Simulation is a way of implementing theoretical constructs that are measurable and testable.

The computational demands associated with navigating large, complexly bonded social groups are thought to have significantly shaped human brain evolution. Yet, research on social network representation and cognitive neuroscience have progressed largely independently. Thus, little is known about how the human brain encodes the structure of the social networks in which it is embedded. This review highlights recent work seeking to bridge this gap in understanding. While the majority of research linking social network analysis and neuroimaging has focused on relating neuroanatomy to social network size, researchers have begun to define the neural architecture that encodes social network structure, cognitive and behavioral consequences of encoding this information, and individual differences in how people represent the structure of their social world.

Interesting article that indicates that deep learning generalizes through some form of compression. If that’s true, then the teurons and layers are learning how to coordinate (who recognizes what), which means dimension reduction and localized alignment (what are the features that make a person vs. a ship). Hmmm.

This explorable illustrates the Kuramoto model for phase coupled oscillators. This model is used to describe synchronization phenomena in natural systems, e.g. the flash synchronization of fire flies or wall-mounted clocks. The model is defined as a system of NN oscillators. Each oscillator has a phase variable θn(t)θn(t) (illustrated by the angular position on a circle below), and an angular frequency ωnωn that captures how fast the oscillator moves around the circle.

This explorable illustrates how a school of fish can collectively find an optimal location, e.g. a dark, unexposed region in their environment simply by light-dependent speed control. The explorable is based on the model discussed in Flock’n Roll, which you may want to explore first. This is how it works: The swarm here consists of 100 individuals. Each individual moves around at a constant speed and changes direction according to three rules

More cool software: Kepler.gl is a powerful open source geospatial analysis tool for large-scale data sets.

Continuing Bit by Bit. Nicely written. currently reading about the pros and cons of using big data. It’s making me think about how to structure the Jury Room data so that it lends itself better to prolonged research.

Military cartography is studied in order to approach the role of information in war. This serves as an opportunity to reconsider the Military Revolution and in particular changes in the eighteenth century. Mapping is approached not only in tactical, operational and strategic terms, but also with reference to the mapping of war for public interest. Shifts in the latter reflect changes in the geography of European conflict.

A rutteris a mariner’s handbook of written sailing directions. Before the advent of nautical charts, rutters were the primary store of geographic information for maritime navigation.

It was known as a periplus (“sailing-around” book) in classical antiquity and a portolano (“port book”) to medieval Italian sailors in the Mediterranean Sea. Portuguese navigators of the 16th century called it a roteiro, the French a routier, from which the English word “rutter” is derived. In Dutch, it was called a leeskarte (“reading chart”), in German a Seebuch (“sea book”), and in Spanish a derroterro

In a world in which computers and networks are increasingly ubiquitous, computing, information, and computation play a central role in how humans work, learn, live, discover, and communicate. Technology is increasingly embedded throughout society, and is becoming commonplace in almost everything we do. The boundaries between humans and technology are shrinking to the point where socio-technical systems are becoming natural extensions to our human experience – second nature, helping us, caring for us, and enhancing us. As a result, computing technologies and human lives, organizations, and societies are co-evolving, transforming each other in the process. Cyber-Human Systems (CHS) research explores potentially transformative and disruptive ideas, novel theories, and technological innovations in computer and information science that accelerate both the creation and understanding of the complex and increasingly coupled relationships between humans and technology with the broad goal of advancing human capabilities: perceptual and cognitive, physical and virtual, social and societal.

Large cascades can develop in online social networks as people share information with one another. Though simple reshare cascades have been studied extensively, the full range of cascading behaviors on social media is much more diverse. Here we study how diffusion protocols, or the social exchanges that enable information transmission, affect cascade growth, analogous to the way communication protocols define how information is transmitted from one point to another. Studying 98 of the largest information cascades on Facebook, we find a wide range of diffusion protocols – from cascading reshares of images, which use a simple protocol of tapping a single button for propagation, to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, whose diffusion protocol involved individuals creating and posting a video, and then nominating specific others to do the same. We find recurring classes of diffusion protocols, and identify two key counterbalancing factors in the construction of these protocols, with implications for a cascade’s growth: the effort required to participate in the cascade, and the social cost of staying on the sidelines. Protocols requiring greater individual effort slow down a cascade’s propagation, while those imposing a greater social cost of not participating increase the cascade’s adoption likelihood. The predictability of transmission also varies with protocol. But regardless of mechanism, the cascades in our analysis all have a similar reproduction number (≈ 1.8), meaning that lower rates of exposure can be offset with higher per-exposure rates of adoption. Last, we show how a cascade’s structure can not only differentiate these protocols, but also be modeled through branching processes. Together, these findings provide a framework for understanding how a wide variety of information cascades can achieve substantial adoption across a network.

Continuing with creating the Simplest LSTM ever

All work and no play makes jack a dull boy indexes alphabetically as :

In this workshop, we walk through the process of building a complete machine learning pipeline covering ingest, exploration, training, evaluation, deployment, and prediction. Along the way, we will discuss how to explore and split large data sets correctly using BigQuery and Cloud Datalab. The machine learning model in TensorFlow will be developed on a small sample locally. The preprocessing operations will be implemented in Cloud Dataflow, so that the same preprocessing can be applied in streaming mode as well. The training of the model will then be distributed and scaled out on Cloud ML Engine. The trained model will be deployed as a microservice and predictions invoked from a web application. This lab consists of 7 parts and will take you about 3 hours. It goes along with this slide deck.

Multi-view learning attempts to generate a classifier with a better performance by exploiting relationship among multiple views. Existing approaches often focus on learning the consistency and/or complementarity among different views. However, not all consistent or complementary information is useful for learning, instead, only class-specific discriminative information is essential. In this paper, we propose a new robust multi-view learning algorithm, called DICS, by exploring the Discriminative and non-discriminative Information existing in Common and view-Specific parts among different views via joint non-negative matrix factorization. The basic idea is to learn a latent common subspace and view-specific subspaces, and more importantly, discriminative and non-discriminative information from all subspaces are further extracted to support a better classification. Empirical extensive experiments on seven real-world data sets have demonstrated the effectiveness of DICS, and show its superiority over many state-of-the-art algorithms.

This resembles hyperparameter tuning. What is the gradient that’s being descended?

Binary retrofitting. Some kind of binary man-in-the-middle?

Two body problem cybersecurity

Question –

discuss how a system might recognize an individual from session to session while being unable to identify the individual

What about multiple combinatorial attacks

What about generating credible false information to attackers, that also has steganographic components for identifying the attacker?

I had managed to not commit the embedding xml and the programs that made them, so first I had to install gensim and lxml at home. After that it’s pretty straightforward to recompute with what I currently have.

…we study a continuous-time opinion dynamics model where the individuals discuss opinions on multiple logically interdependent topics. The logical interdependence between the different topics is captured by a matrix, which is distinct from the Laplacian matrix capturing interactions between individuals. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the network to reach to a consensus on each separate topic.

The genetic algorithm called NEAT will be used to evolve our neural nets from a very simple one at the beginning to more complex ones over many generations. The weights of the neural nets will be solved via back propagation. The awesome recurrent.js library made by karpathy, makes it possible to build computational graph representation of arbitrary neural networks with arbitrary activation functions. I implemented the NEAT algorithm to generate representations of neural nets that recurrent.js can process, so that the library can be used to forward pass through the neural nets that NEAT has discovered, and also to backprop the neural nets to optimise for their weights.

Most animals, including humans, are able to flexibly navigate the world they live in – exploring new areas, returning quickly to remembered places, and taking shortcuts. Indeed, these abilities feel so easy and natural that it is not immediately obvious how complex the underlying processes really are. In contrast, spatial navigation remains a substantial challenge for artificial agents whose abilities are far outstripped by those of mammals.

7:30am – 8:00pm ASRC Tech conference

Maybe generate an fft waveform that can be arbitrarily complex, but repeating and repeatable as a function to learn. We then find the simplest, smallest representation that we can then run hyperparameter tuning algorithms on.